1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to disk drives, and in particular to a disk drive with a cover including a formed-in-place gasket with a cross-sectional cavity.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The typical hard disk drive includes a head disk assembly (HDA) and a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) attached to a disk drive base of the HDA. The head disk assembly includes the disk drive base, a cover, at least one magnetic disk, a spindle motor for rotating the disk, and a head stack assembly (HSA) that includes a transducer head supported by a slider for reading and writing data from and to the disk.
The cover is engaged with the disk drive base with a plurality of screws. Adequate sealing of the cover and the disk drive base is critical in order to maintain a controlled internal environment of the disk drive. To facilitate sealing a gasket may be disposed between the cover and the disk drive base. A conventional gasket may take the form of a solid bead of an elastomer material disposed generally about a periphery of the cover. The material may be dispensed upon the cover in a liquid form that is subsequently cured. This results in the gasket having a solid generally circular cross section. The screws must be highly torqued so as to compress the gasket in order to achieve an adequate seal. There is a need in the art for an improved gasket configuration for use with a disk drive in comparison to the prior art.